William Kidd

Attempted to become a Privateer,
ended up a Pirate (but not a very good one)

Born: 1645 inGreenock, Renfrew,Scotland

Died: May 23rd, 1701
Execution Dock,London

The notorious Captain Kidd was neither particularly ruthless nor
successful. A New York merchant who had previously served as a privateer
against the French in the West Indies,. He was commissioned in 1696 to hunt
pirates but after a series of misfortunes began to raid vessels in the India
Ocean.

He was arrested on his return to America in 1699 and sent to England to
stand trial for piracy. Kidd bungled his own defense and his former backers
concealed vital documents. He was hanged at Execution Dock (Located in
Wapping, London, near the Thames River) and his body
suspended in an iron cage called a "gibbet" at Tilbury Point for years as a
warning to other seamen against piracy.

William Kidd, a.k.a Robert Kidd, Captain Kidd, 17th-century British
privateer and semi-legendary pirate who became celebrated in English
literature as one of the most colorful outlaws of all time. Fortune seekers
have hunted his buried treasure in vain through succeeding centuries.

Kidd 's early career is obscure. It is believed he went to sea as a youth.
After 1689 he was sailing as a legitimate privateer for Great Britain
against the French in the West Indies and off the coast of North America. In
1690 he was an established sea captain and ship owner in New York City,
where he owned property; at various times he was dispatched by both New York
and Massachusetts to rid the coast of enemy privateers. In London in 1695,
he received a royal commission to apprehend pirates who molested the ships
of the East India Company in the Red Sea and in the Indian Ocean.

Kidd sailed from Deptford on his ship, the Adventure Galley, on Feb. 27,
1696, called at Plymouth, and arrived at New York City on July 4 to take on
more men. Avoiding the normal pirate haunts, he arrived by February 1697 at
the Comoro Islands off East Africa. It was apparently some time after his
arrival there that Kidd , still without having taken a prize ship, decided
to turn to piracy. In August 1697 he made an unsuccessful attack on ships
sailing with Mocha coffee from Yemen but later took several small ships. His
refusal two months later to attack a Dutch ship nearly brought his crew to
mutiny, and in an angry exchange Kidd mortally wounded his gunner, William
Moore.

Kidd took his most valuable prize, the Armenian ship Quedagh Merchant, in
January 1698 and scuttled his own un-seaworthy Adventure Galley. When he
reached Anguilla, in the West Indies (April 1699), he learned that he had
been denounced as a pirate. He left the Quedagh Merchant at the island of
Hispaniola (where the ship was possibly scuttled; in any case, it
disappeared with its questionable booty) and sailed in a newly purchased
ship, the Antonio, to New York City, where he tried to persuade the earl of
Bellomont, then colonial governor of New York, of his innocence. Bellomont,
however, sent him to England for trial, and he was found guilty (May 8 and
9, 1701) of the murder of Moore and on five indictments of piracy. Important
evidence concerning two of the piracy cases was suppressed at the trial, and
some observers later questioned whether the evidence was sufficient for a
guilty verdict.

Kidd was hanged, and some of his treasure was recovered from Gardiners
Island off Long Island. Proceeds from his effects and goods taken from the
Antonio were donated to charity. In years that followed, the name of Captain
Kidd has become inseparable from the romanticized concept of the
swashbuckling pirate of Western fiction.

Among other stories concerning caches of treasure he supposedly buried is
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug."